The day after my eighth birthday, my father told me that I was nine. A bit of a shock, if you could imagine, but on the whole not that big of a deal. So I’d missed a year somewhere – but what’s a year? In one year I may have begun to learn an instrument but I’d still be up to the bit where I’d be wearing earplugs, walking while I play, just to get away from the noise.

The first year of my life was spent in a hospital in intensive care after a spectacularly hazardous cesarean. Once the bones healed and my eyes worked, I was released. My father decided 12 months in hospital wasn’t the best introduction to the world so he decided that first year was kind of like another year in the womb. A year after I was born, I entered the real world at the prime age of zero in my father’s eyes.